Here in Bingzhongluo, a peaceful backpacker magnet, those who treasure the fast-moving, jade-green beauty of the Nu say the four proposed dams in Yunnan and the one already under construction in Tibet would irrevocably alter what guidebooks refer to as the Grand Canyon of the East. A soaring, 370-mile-long gorge carpeted with thick forests, the area is home to roughly half of China’s animal species, many of them endangered, including the snow leopard, the black snub-nosed monkey and the red panda.

Clinging improbably to the alpine peaks are mist-shrouded villages whose residents are among the area’s dozen or so indigenous tribes, most with their own languages. “The project will be good for the local government, but it will be a disaster for the local residents,” said Wan Li, 42, who in 2003 left behind his big-city life as an accountant in the provincial capital, Kunming, to open a youth hostel here. “They will lose their culture, their traditions and their livelihood, and we will be left with a placid, lifeless reservoir.”

As one of two major rivers in China still unimpeded by dams, the Nu has a fiercely devoted following among environmentalists who have grown despondent over the destruction of many of China’s waterways. The Ministry of Water Resources released a survey in March saying that 23,000 rivers had disappeared entirely and many of the nation’s most storied rivers had become degraded by pollution. The mouth of the Yellow River is little more than an effluent-fouled trickle, and the once-mighty Yangtze has been tamed by the Three Gorges Dam, a $25 billion project that displaced 1.4 million people.

For many advocates, the Nu has become something of a last stand. “Why can’t China have just one river that isn’t destroyed by humans?” asked Wang Yongchen, a well-known environmentalist in Beijing who has visited the area a dozen times in recent years.

“As China’s population and economy have rapidly grown, the country has experienced serious degradation of its water resources, including massive overuse and contamination,” Gleick said. “The ‘disappearance’ of major rivers and streams is far more likely to be directly connected to uncontrolled and unsustainable extraction of water for industry and agriculture, though climate change may play a greater role in the future.”

[…] What about the statistical discrepancies that the government says could have factored in to the rivers’ disappearance? While some updates to river classification are plausible, cartography and mapping techniques have been very sophisticated in China for many years. One user on Sina Weibo tweeted an old map of waterways for Qingdao, showing abundant waterways in considerable detail. The maps are accurate and Qingdao’s rivers have not been wiped away by “improved surveying methods” — they have simply been converted into Qingdao’s sprawling roadways, said one of the city’s urban historians.

So why is the Chinese government blaming only climate change and statistical inaccuracies? Climate change is an easy and popular scapegoat and allows the government to save face by pinning the disappearance on natural causes rather than anthropogenic (and arguably preventable) ones.

Quoting former water resources minister Wang Shucheng, Jacobs notes that the Nu river dams reflect a “fight for every drop or die” attitude towards water management. As a region once regarded as a reliable water source becomes increasingly prone to drought, Yunnan’s deputy Party secretary Qiu He argued at the National People’s Congress in March that the province needed more hydroengineering to help regulate its water supply. But Yang Fangyi and Zhou Jiading argue at chinadialogue that this function is best fulfilled naturally, by forests:

If you look at the amount of precipitation in Yunnan, you might struggle to understand how the province could be hit by drought. The monsoons bring plenty of rain during a distinct wet season. However, thanks to the province’s geography, that rain falls unevenly. Some south-western areas can see as much as 3,000 millimetres of rain a year, while arid valleys might have less than 500 millimetres.

So climate and geography result in an uneven distribution of water, and therefore shortages during the dry season. Normally, Yunnan’s forests and wetlands regulate this imbalance, acting as sponges that soak up water during the monsoons and gradually release it. Millions of people in Yunnan benefit, including those living downstream of Yunnan’s six major rivers – in the Yangtze and Pearl River basins, for example.

But the continued drought is a warning of the damage being done to those ecosystems.

Yunnan is heavily-forested. But the original forests, able to store and regulate water, have virtually been destroyed. Serious environmental damage has been done.

Though 53% of the province is still covered with forest, Greenpeace estimates that only 9% of this is original growth. Yunnan has seen an enormous expansion of monocultural commercial forests of eucalyptus, fir and especially rubber, which lack the water-regulating capabilities of the old forests. In addition, rubber trees require more water for themselves, and their cultivation involves the use of chemicals that contaminate what remains. As Chris Horton writes at The Atlantic, Yunnan’s rubber boom has brought new prosperity to local farmers, but may be sowing the seeds of its own collapse:

By 2010, more than 22 percent of Xishuangbanna [whose forests are cited by Yang and Zhou as exceptionally well protected] was rubber farms, a calculation that doesn’t account for the crop’s intrusion into the Xishuangbanna and Nanbanhe Nature Reserves, which Grumbine described as “significant.” In sum, Grumbine, Xu and Beckschaefer’s findings show that Xishuangbanna’s rubber industry at present is anything but sustainable.

Rubber plantations sequester less carbon than natural forests and their spread has led to a substantial net release of carbon dioxide. Because after the first few years the plantations require chemical fertilizers that often contaminate nearby bodies of water, oxygen-sapping algae can bloom and kill off fish and other aquatic species. In addition, since rubber trees use more water than native vegetation or other crops, especially during the hot months of November through April, the area’s dry season is growing longer and both the number of foggy days and the amount of fog on those days is declining, affecting other agricultural production and regional food security.

The team’s paper concludes that if the local climate continues its hotter and drier trend, it could become unsuitable for growing rubber altogether, a development that would devastate the local economy.

Horton concludes with proposals to avert such a collapse by strategically restoring and preserving the natural forest. But attempting instead to regulate water with dams may remain attractive in the short-term, offering both its own economic boost and the hope that profitably unrestrained rubber farming can continue.

A mysterious pestilence has befallen this island’s primeval forests, leaving behind the bleached, skeletal remains of dead trees that now dot the dark green mountainsides. Osamu Nagafuchi, an environmental engineer with a passion for the island and its rugged terrain, believes he knows the culprit: airborne pollutants from smog-belching China, hundreds of miles upwind.

[…] These fears have reached a new level recently as China itself has issued more public warnings about the growing health risks from its cities’ gray, soupy air. While Mr. Nagafuchi and a small number of collaborators say their research is not politically motivated, they admit that they may be finding more receptivity among a public that already resents China for supplanting Japan as Asia’s largest economy, and for what is seen as its haughty attitude in a territorial dispute over islands both countries claim.

[…] Residents who believe the pollution is caused by China described feeling helpless, saying they doubt there is any action their government can take even if it becomes convinced Mr. Nagafuchi is right.

“There is not much we can do about this, except ask the Chinese to spend more money on environmental cleanup,” said Mr. Tetsuka, Mr. Nagafuchi’s research assistant. “I’m afraid it will only get worse and worse.”

Hideaki Koyanagi, director of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)’s Beijing office, sees the air pollution issue as an opportunity to improve Sino-Japanese relations.

“Pollution knows no borders,” Koyanagi told the Global Times. “What the Japanese people don’t understand is if we help to improve the air quality in China, it will eventually benefit Japan.”

[…] Koyanagi wrote an op-ed piece for the Kyodo News, outlying China’s efforts to control air pollution such as shutting down polluting and unsafe factories and promoting clean energies.

“Blaming China can’t solve the air pollution problem,” Koyanagi said. “It is very important for Japan to use its experience to help China with its policymaking and understand that helping China is helping itself.”

Five decades ago, people were asking similar questions about Japan. Even as the world marveled at the country’s 10 percent annual growth, alarm was growing over air pollution in several cities. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide tripled during the 1960s. Japan became known for pollution-related illnesses: Yokkaichi asthma, Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) — both named after the cities where they first appeared — and cadmium poisoning, known as itai-itai, or “ouch-ouch,” because of the excruciating bone pain it caused.

[…] It was only when citizens’ movements, which grew out of protests against the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the Vietnam War, got the attention of opposition parties in the 1960s and early 1970s that the government was forced to confront pollution. “I saw the government and L.D.P. as responding just enough, just in time, when the pressure got strong enough that they could defuse the opposition and stay in power,” said Timothy George, a professor at the University of Rhode Island and the author of a book on Minamata disease.

The first result was a blizzard of laws — 14 passed at once — in what became known as the Pollution Diet of 1970. Air pollution fell dramatically in the years that followed.

China has tried to clamp down on chopsticks before — chiefly by taxing them and wooden floor boards, another environmental offender. In 2008, the Wall Street Journal’s Jane Spencer reported on a cultural backlash against the chopsticks, led by celebrities, activists and environmentally minded youth.

…

But protest does not appear to have done the trick. In 2010, a massive mudslide that killed 700 was blamed on deforestation, reports the Wall Street Journal. Some reports on deforestation have been censored on the Chinese web. The citizen journalist Liu Futang, who was later tried for his work, told the Post in 2010 that China “is a real-life example of the film ‘Avatar.’ Except in ‘Avatar,’ they could organize together to fight back.”

Perhaps Bo Guangxin’s appeal to parliament, translated by Global Post, represents an appeal to more transparently confront the issue.

When I was growing up, my parents and I used a knife and fork more often than chopsticks, slicing cleanly into meat-and-veg meals at the western restaurants they favoured. Singaporean noodle dishes were enjoyed, whenever possible, pulled high and slurped from a fork or twirled around its tines, Italian-style. Even when savouring one of my beloved grandmother’s meals – steamed fish, soy-braised chicken wings, pickled radish stir-fried with sliced pork – I ate off a plate, heaping food onto a spoon with the help of a fork, while my grandmother held up her bowl and pushed rice into her mouth with her chopsticks in the traditional Chinese way.

It was only after my time in China that I had better insight into how integral chopsticks are to the country’s identity. It would be a shame if that gets eroded. Knives and forks, whose use at the table is said to have been discouraged by benevolent philosopher Confucius because they were instruments of killing, don’t have the same rich traditions and legacy of elegance and delicacy.

“It’s just like in the United States in the 1960s, when every single redwood tree was a target for illegal logger[s],” says Suwanna Gauntlett, head of the Phnom Penh office of Wildlife Alliance. “It’s the same thing in Cambodia. It’s a natural resource worth a lot of money.”

And many people with money — particularly China’s growing middle class — are eager to spend it on luxury hardwood furniture, says Tracy Farrell of Conservation International.

“You also have the fact that other countries have been culling or reducing the extraction of their own luxury wood,” Farrell says. “Thailand has been becoming much more strict about illegal wood leaking out of their country, so that puts the pressure on the countries that are less strict. … Laos and Cambodia are really, really struggling.”

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/02/as-china-builds-cambodias-forests-fall/feed/0Appetite for Bamboo Is Damaging Forestshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/08/appetite-for-bamboo-is-damaging-forests/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/08/appetite-for-bamboo-is-damaging-forests/#commentsFri, 12 Aug 2011 07:07:35 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=123210Bamboo is often marketed as a green wonder material, but its cultivation can be seriously destructive to local ecosystems. Sean Gallagher reports for the Pulitzer Center on surging bamboo production in Sichuan and its environmental consequences:

“Demand is bigger than supply,” says Li Yugang, the head of Jiulong village, a typical rural hamlet in southern Sichuan which is encircled by bamboo forests. He seems optimistic about the newfound potential of bamboo to bring income to his community. “The first policy was 12 years ago, which said, if you grow bamboo, the government will give you more money. Now, bamboo is 70-80 percent of income in the area. The government has encouraged local people to ‘do better’, to plant more bamboo in the same area.”

This encouragement from the authorities, coupled with the obvious financial gains from planting and harvesting bamboo, has led to widespread over-harvesting and intensive monoculture plantations in many parts of southwest China in recent years. Unbeknownst to many locals, this has resulted in serious negative effects on local ecosystems, worrying environmental and scientific observers.

“During the past 15-20 years, a vast area of natural bamboo forests in many counties in the province has been turned into monoculture forests,” says Li of IBAR. “There is an urgent need to demonstrate long-term technical and policy strategies to halt and restore the degraded biodiversity and the natural productivity of the damaged forests. The trends of monoculture forests leads to biodiversity loss and ecosystem service decrease. Local communities believe that monocultures can bring more income. To change this strong belief is the main challenge.”

Among the dangers of plant monocultures are increased susceptibility to pests and diseases and the degradation of soil as loss of biodiversity leaves nutrient and other cycles broken.

One factor in the industry’s rapid growth is a 1998 logging ban whose tight restrictions on timber cutting made bamboo an attractive alternative. Another consequence of the ban has been an explosion of Chinese logging in Burma, as The Globe and Mail reported last month:

“It can’t last more than another 10 years, maybe just five or six years if they cut faster,” said Chen Jinian, office manager at Sen Long Timber, a company owned by his uncle that has been importing wood from Myanmar since the early 1990s.

Mr. Chen recently returned from a cross-border trip to negotiate a purchase, and said that his company has had to go deeper and deeper into the heart of Myanmar to find good-quality wood since the once-lush forests in the borderlands were now all but exhausted. In Yunnan province, on the Chinese side of the border, cutting is strictly regulated by authorities and the mountains are still topped with valuable but protected forests.

In Myanmar, Mr. Chen said, it’s a free-for-all, with the central government in Naypyidaw, local military commanders and anti-government ethnic militias that control the border areas all willing to sell the forests under their control in exchange for desperately needed cash. “When you cross the border to the Myanmar side, you can see the mountains that no longer have any trees on them,” he said. “Soon the trees will be all cut. Without the trees, there will be only mountains. So we will look into mining them.”

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/08/appetite-for-bamboo-is-damaging-forests/feed/0China Sets Bees on American Immigrantshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/08/china-sets-bees-on-american-immigrants/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/08/china-sets-bees-on-american-immigrants/#commentsTue, 09 Aug 2011 21:47:19 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=123141Northern Chinese forestry authorities released over half a billion bees in order to suppress a destructive plague of American moths, according to Xinhua:

Forestry authorities in north China’s city of Baoding released 600 million bees this month to kill off American white moths, which have plagued large areas of crops and forests ….

The bees use their stingers to bore into white moths’ pupa and kill their larvae. The bees have been previously used to eliminate moth infestations in the provinces of Hebei and Shandong.

Known as the “forest locust,” the moths can destroy more than 300 plants and consume the leaves of two hectares’ worth of poplar trees within two days.

According to the State Forestry Administration, the pest has threatened plants and crops in Beijing, Tianjin, Shaanxi, Hebei and Shandong since it was first detected in Liaoning Province in 1979.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/08/china-sets-bees-on-american-immigrants/feed/2China’s Forests Have Role in Soaking Up CO2 – Studyhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/04/chinas-forests-have-role-in-soaking-up-co2-study/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/04/chinas-forests-have-role-in-soaking-up-co2-study/#commentsThu, 23 Apr 2009 04:08:46 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=37785Alister Doyle of Reuters reports on the role of Chinese forests in carbon dioxide absorption:

A study by Peking University said that increased summer rains, efforts to plant forests, an expansion of shrubland, shifts in crop use and higher bamboo mass soaked up between 28 and 37 percent of industrial emissions in the 1980s and 1990s.

The study gave the first estimate of the impact of plants in offsetting carbon dioxide emissions in China, which has recently overtaken the United States as top emitter. Plants soak up carbon as they grow and release it when they burn or rot.

The report, in the journal Nature, also said that China’s plants and soils soaked up more carbon per square metre than in Europe but less than in the United States.

But a U.S. scientist said the percentage of emissions absorbed by plants was falling because a surge in economic growth in recent years meant China’s industrial emissions were expanding faster than vegetation.

In early July, Hainan’s People’s Congress conducted a blanket examination of its forest resources. The island also invited media outlets from Beijing and other provinces to “expose the shame (Êè≠‰∏ë),” that the province has lost more than 1 million mu of natural forests since 2000. This, inviting the media from all over, was a first.

But it was not a first for Liu Futang (ÂàòÁ¶èÂ†Ç), an official with the Provincial Forestry Bureau in charge of fire prevention and a provincial CPPCC vice chairman on population, resources and environment committee. He has fought with all his heart against many around him in the forest rush that has swept through the province in the late economic boom centered around the paper industry.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/08/a-lonely-war-on-forest-destruction-fu-xueli/feed/0China’s Recycling ‘Saves Forests’ – BBChttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/07/chinas-recycling-saves-forests-bbc/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/07/chinas-recycling-saves-forests-bbc/#commentsTue, 17 Jul 2007 08:17:57 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/07/17/chinas-recycling-saves-forests-bbc/
It appears not every bit of environmental news out of China bespeaks disaster. A new report from Forest Trends, an NGO, credits Chinese willingness to use recycled waste paper with]]>
It appears not every bit of environmental news out of China bespeaks disaster. A new report from Forest Trends, an NGO, credits Chinese willingness to use recycled waste paper with the salvation of millions of tons’ worth of forests worldwide:

“Just last year, China’s use of waste-paper instead of trees to make paper products probably saved 54 million metric tons of wood being harvested for pulp,” said Brian Stafford, the report’s lead author.

Over the past decade, the study said, the nation’s imports of waste-paper had increased five-fold, making it the world’s biggest consumer of the material. [Full Text]

The report warns, however, that future demand for paper products in China may exceed supply of recycled material.

Every year around this time, many cities and regions of China hold a tree-planting month. Employers in the cities often fund tree-planting outings for their staff. In counties, towns and villages, farmers are given support for tree-planting projects, which they hope will bring in some extra earnings. A renewed enthusiasm for greening the country seems to take hold of everyone.

The Chinese government has committed itself to achieving a target of 20% forest cover by 2010. And as a result, the State Forestry Administration has been promoting greater integration between forestry and the paper industry, as well as promoting tree-planting initiatives, especially of fast-growing, high-yield trees. However, just as these measures are being enthusiastically put into place, something very worrying is happening to China’s forests – they are becoming empty. So, how are these “empty forests” being created? [Full Text]

Its spokesman Cao Qingyao denied accusations of China plundering the world’s rainforests to meet its booming demand for wood. “The statement concerning the question that China’s large demand for timber results in illegal logging and smuggling from Asia is groundless,” Cao said at a news conference. [Full Text]

Widespread tree planting in China has slowed the rate at which the earth’s forested area is dwindling, but the clearing of tropical forests, much of it in areas never previously cut, continues to grow, according to a new United Nations report.

The study was published yesterday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based in Rome, and is online at fao.org/forestry.

Western politicians queue up to sing its praises. Economists regard it with awe and delight. Other countries are desperate to imitate it. Yet there is another side to China’s exploding, double-digit-growth miracle economy – it is turning into one of the greatest environmental threats the earth has ever faced.

Chinese logging companies are still plundering vast swathes of forests in northern Burma in collusion with local ethnic militias, despite Beijing’s past commitments to crack down on illegal logging, an environmental group said.

Global Witness, a UK-based agency that links natural resource exploitation with conflict situations, said around 95 per cent of the wood China imports from Burma has been cut in violation of Burma’s forest laws. The illegal logging results in an annual loss of around $250m to the Burmese people.

The forests of Zhangjiagang are horizontal: tens of thousands of felled, stripped trees lying on the quayside of China’s biggest timber port, far from their roots in Indonesia, Russia, South America and Africa.

The trunks of pine, maple, merbau and zebra wood are dead, but this forest is growing. Every year, more and more logs are shipped into these wharves to satisfy the voracious demand for timber in the world’s most populous and fastest rising nation.